BEETHOVEN SUMMER MADNESS, AND IS THE PROJECT STILL ON? (it is!)

Dear all, the project has been silent for far too long. There will be many new videos released in the coming weeks and months, so I thought now is the moment for me to bring the channel up to date. Those of you who have been following the project on social media will already know most of the below, so please feel free to skip this and come back tomorrow for Sonata No. 10! But for those of you who followed the project here or on Beethoven32.com, I would first like to apologize for the dearth of updates, and secondly, to fill in the gap between the last post and now.

Even though I kept posting new sonatas until May, all that material had in fact been filmed by late winter. We were supposed to film the next sonatas in March, but the world drastically changed course, and all our plans fell through. I was on tour in the States when cancellations and lockdowns started happening in Europe and the US. Half the tour got cancelled from one day to the other, and I barely managed to change my flights and get home. I won’t bore you with the ultimately unexceptional story of all my concerts getting cancelled in quick succession from mid-March to more or less now. Instead of live concerts, I was doing live-streams from home every 1-3 days, and it was the direct contact with the online audience, their support and their presence which helped me get through these difficult months.

In June, the first hints of a chance to continue filming appeared, and Stewart and I pounced on that chance like hungry hawks. We scheduled a period of filming in the second half of July, and decided to film as much as I could humanly prepare, as the autumn looked untrustworthy, with its risk of a second wave.

Happily, the July sessions took place, and we were able to film 13 (!) sonatas over 9 filming days. Those included the Moonlight, Pastoral, Tempest, Waldstein and Appassionata, as well as all the unnamed-yet-no-less-magnificent sonatas in between. As 9 of these 13 sonatas were completely new to me, those two weeks in Sacile, Italy (home of the Fazioli pianos) ended up being more intensely challenging than anything I've done in the last years. But they were also a huge source of joy and fulfilment; a truly unforgettable musical experience.

So what now? I still have two ‘old’ sonatas to share with you – Nos. 10 and 11 – and I will do so tomorrow and next weekend. Then, while waiting for the new material to be released, I will be posting session notes from July: thoughts about the sonatas and a kind of diary of how the filming went each day. And finally, on the 11th of September, it will be my great pleasure to share with you the first sonata from the July sessions – No. 12, Op. 26.

Видео BEETHOVEN SUMMER MADNESS, AND IS THE PROJECT STILL ON? (it is!) канала Boris Giltburg